Talk:Wild Adventure/@comment-138263-20180331234936
I surmise that Don and John were later able to shunt fuel from one system to another, so that while they couldn't alter course to Earth after rescuing Smith, they realized they'd need it eventually, so worked it out. And for whatever reason, the robots refueled the ship for their own nefarious purposes, foolishly doing so before the humans were removed from it (perhaps with an expectation they were invincible and would immediately crew the ship with robots to take it somewhere). The fueling may not have been complete when Jupiter lifted off, or they exhausted it trying to evade the missiles, and lost what was left when they crashed on Tiabo's planet. As to which Christmas was depicted in "Return From Outer Space" and what date it is now... we are dealing with high acceleration and time dilation. Somehow, Don and John have managed to improve the Jupiter II to achieve FTL speeds, because there's no other way they could get back to Earth's area of the galaxy so quickly. We have to figure that Priplanus is/was at least ten light years away, maybe 15 or 20, orbiting a non-descript dwarf star. It is likely that it is sometime late in 1998 or early in 1999, a year and some months since lift-off. There's the possibility that the Tauron device was not in proper operating condition, and while the Robot was able to use it to target Earth, there is no guarantee that the device locked properly on time coordinates, and may have sent Will a few months into the future. A possible time line: Oct 1997 - Jupiter II lifts off. Within 48 hours, it has undergone a hyper-velocity maneuver that sends it an unknown distance, encounters an alien sleeper ship, then attempts a landing on Priplanus (who gave it that name? - Will? The Robot's transliteration of alien text?). 2Q 1998 - Will leaves Priplanus by maser beam, and although he arrives on Earth, it is near the end of 1998, and people have put up Christmas decorations. early 3Q 1998 - Alonzo P. Tucker visits Priplanus late Dec 1998 - Jupiter II lifts off from Priplanus, and returns to the vicinity of Earth, where Alpha Control is still assessing the "artifact" found in Hatfield Four Corners (a busted communicator unit) and the photographs of Will Robinson. Of course, it is a wild coincidence that Will visited Earth and Jupiter II passes by at about the same time, but who knows what sort of quirks the Jupiter's improvised FTL drive is rife with? (A predestination paradox - the Tauron unit locks on where/when the Jupiter hasn't yet been but WILL be!) It later shoots them back to 1947 and then somehow restores them to the end of the 1990s. What if it caught the same time-space currents that the Tauron maser caught up on to send Will to Earth? While rocket ships don't need to burn fuel constantly, for Jupiter to make so many landings and travel so many parsecs, it has to have a better drive than the contractors installed. Don and John must have gotten some insight from Tucker's ship to eventually fashion their own, and an FTL field requires constant energy expenditure to maintain. In "Reluctant Stowaway", the ship is accelerating towards 0.8 C, but from "Blast Off Into Space" onward, it is both accelerating, decelerating, course changing and maintaining an FTL field. I should also point out that Earth cannot be hidden by the sun from being in view of Alpha Centauri. The declination of Alpha Centauri is 60 degrees, so Alpha Centauri is never hidden from us by the sun. The Jupiter might possibly be aimed on a course near the sun, but not at it. Of course, how could any of them know what time of year it was on Earth to know where Earth was along its orbit?